JSConf US 2015

Introducing NemoJS (http://nemo.js.org, https://github.com/paypal/nemo), a test and task runner agnostic selenium wrapper - with confit (https://github.com/krakenjs/confit) for configuration and a plugin architecture for precise customization and modularity. Transcript: https://gist.github.com/voodootikigod/84fbe0b6838f23099b8a

Through out history, JS has been pointed out as the villain when the matter is accessible websites. By presenting some tricks and techniques, we plan to provoke this discussion among developers, and show that Accessibility and JS may live together, as long as you take the right steps. Transcript: https://gist.github.com/voodootikigod/1e5013ba03b86b60b0b7

Making the mobile web platform better, both for ourselves and for the next two billion users, is one of the most important challenges of our careers. It's not enough to rely on standards organizations and browser vendors to solve our technical and cultural problems. We've got to do more. I'm going to take a look at solving problems such as performance, routing, and offline experiences by circumventing the DOM, building hybrid Android apps, and using persistent background queues. Not that these approaches will solve all your problems – but rather, help you set new benchmarks, give greater clarity and direction to the bugs you file on browser vendors, and ultimately get you better results. By making bold technical decisions, we move the web forward. Instead of improving and optimizing the problematic paradigms/assumptions under which the web was built, we should borrow patterns from other mobile platforms or invent new ones. We also need to understand how the experience of coming online for the first time will be very different for the next generation of primarily non-North American mobile users. Transcript: https://gist.github.com/voodootikigod/c546de804bcb7f8240d7

Who in their right mind would ever want to work with RDBMS anymore. Especially in JavaScript, where you can just call "save" on your JSON and turn it into web-scale BSON, or get to choose between so many levels of DB that we don't even know which to use. This will be a story about one person's journey to try and make people believe that Node can actually be a thing for boring, early-2000's era web applications using (gasp) SQL. It'll also share some discoveries along the way including how ACID / transactions can be super useful in the everything-async world of JavaScript, and some tips and tricks for keeping a sane and organized data layer when venturing into the abyss of hybrid single-page / server-rendered applications. Transcript: https://gist.github.com/voodootikigod/36d5eb51686805459bfa

Currently there are ES7 features proposed for async programming that have never been seen in a programming language before. If accepted, these proposals could allow entire JS applications to be written without a single callback! By providing the same level of support for async functions as regular functions, ES7 could dramatically alter the way everyday developers write code. Imagine reading data from a stream or a web socket with a simple loop. Imagine catching async errors using try/catch, and never again finding yourself in the callback pyramid of doom. Transcript: https://gist.github.com/voodootikigod/74935e99334367e2c09c

The formula for a Bezier curve is beautiful. Using sine and cosine to create orbiting objects is dazzling. L-systems create fractals through elegant simplicity. Developers, as a group, may be losing site of the beauty that code can create. Designers by the bunch are picking up a keyboard and creating amazing pieces, but it's happening the other way very slowly. That's a shame, because the computer lets otherwise unexpressed ideas go unexplored. Developers have the ability to embrace the art of programming and the art of art because of the myriad frameworks available. Use the language of your choice to make some art, whether it’s in the browser or in the physical realm. Walk away with the confidence and the inspiration to put down the work for a minute and pick up a digital paintbrush. Transcript: https://gist.github.com/voodootikigod/3bb0e6fc1d03189e5274

Wouldn't it be cool if you could "print out" your own javascript generated bitmap art as a knitted scarf ? Well, you can ! Knitting textiles is a lot like programing computers. You write your knit pattern (code), your brain compiles it, and your hands render knit stitches (1s) and purl stitches (0s). It means you can decipher knitting nomenclature like "k2, m1L, k1, m1L, k until 3 sts remain, m1R, k1, m1R, k2" into JavaScript. This talk will cover how you can program knitting patterns in JavaScript and then use an electronic knitting machine from the 1980's to make beautiful knitted textiles. Transcript: https://gist.github.com/voodootikigod/a575bcb3cffc767f79a3

With the amazing performance of modern single threaded JavaScript how can we catch up in parallelism? Today’s hardware provides specialized instructions that can operate on data in parallel and provides multiple execution units that can run code in parallel. The single threaded nature of classic JavaScript cannot take advantage of these resources. When quad-core smartphones are already available today that leaves a lot of performance potential on the table. I will share work we are doing to extend JavaScript with flexible and powerful primitives for parallelism that will unlock new performance opportunities to the Web. Let’s explore how native code concepts like shared memory and execution synchronization could work in JavaScript. With great power comes great responsibility so I will touch on some mitigation strategies we have in place to make sure tomorrow’s web applications stay well behaved as they use all the horsepower your hardware can provide. Transcript: https://gist.github.com/voodootikigod/e146469b95b7c25962cd

Have you ever wanted to make those 8-bit sounding tunes from your childhood? What better way to do it than using the actual hardware to get that classic sound? Oh wait. I have to learn some archaic assembler? Not anymore! Now make those classic sounds from your childhood with JavaScript. This talk will go over the basics of how sound works on the NES, and how we can use JavaScript to make music on the NES. Transcript: https://gist.github.com/voodootikigod/c64128faa999728c4cb0

I’m starvin’. I throw open my laptop, and search by what I've got in the house to minimize me running to the store. I'm craving a flavor, not necessarily a cuisine. Some southern food has its origins in West African food. How do recipe searches address this? How do we combine curation of good recipe content with better search to avoid having to build a recommendation engine? In this talk, we’ll take a look at the current state of web recipe discovery and how I naively tried to come up with an alternative with brute JavaScript force and graph-databasing; like baking a souffle for a dinner party and doing a no-fall dance before it comes out of the oven. Plan for the worst and be delighted when it doesn’t happen(or chuckle when it does)!

Pshhhkkkkkkrrrr​kakingkakingkakingtsh​chchchchchchchcch​dingdingding The siren song of the dialup modem that summoned AIM and the Book of Mozilla has a language unto itself. In this talk, we’ll learn how to implement an end-to-end frequency-shift keying modem, capable of sending and receiving data between computers using the Web Audio API. By using a browser, I’ll provide an interactive session detailing how we can use javascript to encode and decode what modem tones really mean.

When you weren't looking, someone stuck a synthesizer into your favorite web browser. The Web Audio API is widely supported and makes it easy—and more importantly, fun—to create, process, and control audio in the browser. We can spin up oscillators, adjust gain, tweak frequencies, and slap on some funky delay. Additionally, we can also take existing sounds and manipulate them to our heart's content. We can grab input from cameras and microphones and use them as we see fit. But, the fun doesn't stop there—we still have the rest of the browser's media APIs at our disposal. We'll talk a little bit about the Web Audio API. We'll explore the browser as a vehicle for creative expression. We'll fire up some audio contexts and connect some nodes. We'll also leverage the getUserMedia Web API, WebSockets, and others to build unique musical instruments that could only be possible in the web browser. We'll not only talk about the API itself, but also some of the fundamental concepts for working with audio and making music.

What do you do when you only have a few regular attendees? Is your own schedule so crammed you can't sustainably present every topic every month? Do you still want a local user group? Some hard won experience from a local web developer meetup co-organizer. Or, how we kept the user group going and helped foster continued growth in attendance and participation.

What actually happens when your code is run? Our programs are simple text documents composed of patterns of rules, but the processes they guide aren't nearly as well behaved. Function scopes are generated, data is plumbed through pathways, bits are shifted and applications are evaluated. There's a lot of ins, a lot of outs. It's a very complicated case. We can gain some insight into the process with console.log and step-through debuggers, but we're left to develop a full program simulation in our minds based only on the code we wrote and the tiny snapshots our debugger gives us -- effectively requiring a JS interpreter to be compiled into our wetware. This can make it somewhat challenging to reason about our work. We'll look at some ways of remedying this, starting with basic data structures and tiptoeing toward full programs. Your code is the DNA for a process: let's build an illustrated anatomy guide.

Javascript has always been a language with very little syntactic sugar—for better or worse. With ES6/2015, and future iterations,though, Javascript is gaining a more and more abstract and expressive syntax. To some it might appear that our language—which already seems accessible and approachable for beginners— is becoming even more accessible and approachable. However, both the humanities and CS education research have proven that abstraction, while a powerful tool for knowledgeable practitioners, can be an equally powerful foil for beginners. As we enter the era of language-level abstractions in ES6/2015, we are charged with the task of rethinking how we teach JavaScript. Through an interdisciplinary montage I will identify the problem of teaching abstraction as a ubiquitous demand across nearly every domain, and align the issues of creativity and critical thinking in the humanities with issues in computer science. The talk will conclude with a discussion of how the discipline of computer science and that of the humanities can inform each other to produce more effective and creative solutions to both developing and teaching abstractions.

I made the open source project Babel and will be presenting on how JavaScript transformation and ES6 can help improve developer workflow and how it can futureproof their code. Not only transpilation to ES6 but how Babel has support for Flow, JSX and React so it can be integrated into many workflows extremely nicely. There are many challenges associated with transforming JavaScript as well as AST manipulation that I think would be extremely beneficial for the average developer to know about. There's even crazy stuff like transpiling proxies/Object.observe which wraps every single expression in a method.

In the amount of time it would take to have a pizza delivered, I'll teach you about accessibility through JavaScript testing. By using a pragmatic approach to software quality, we can create a more inclusive Web. Take it from someone who has broken high-profile builds: you can win by automating tests for common accessibility problems and catching them before they are deployed out into the world.

JavaScript is everywhere, but too often it's locked in computers and phones. We need to bridge the gap between the physical world and your computer... It's time to alter the world around us with JavaScript! In previous JSConf talks Jan Jongboom ripped mainboards out of phones; abused sensors; and juggled devices, but this session is going to be harder, deeper, higher and more crazy! How about procedural music generated by the sensor data of all members of the audience? Using bluetooth beacons to find out if the person next to you is worth talking to? Hardware hacking your Firefox OS phone to add more sensors? Geofencing your newborn with a phone mainboard? And all of that... with JavaScript! Loaded with demo's this talk will forever change the way you think about JavaScript in the real world. LET'S DO THIS!